The Worst Typo I Ever Made
Tom Scott2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2020–2026
commentary · general · evergreen · 2020–2026 on HN
Tom Scott recounts the worst typo he ever made, a subtle mistake in code with destructive consequences at a previous job. It is a cautionary tale about irreversible operations.
Shared in outage and accidental-deletion threads as a relatable, well-told horror story.
Up next
11 mo on HN🚀 TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong (Ian Cooper)
DevTernity Conference
11 HN recommender · 2018–2024
11 mo on HNBret Victor The Future of Programming
Joey Reid
12 HN recommender · 2017–2026
10 mo on HN"Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming"
Paul Stringer's Mobile Tech
10 HN recommender · 2016–2022
10 mo on HNTim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools
ClojureTV
9 HN recommender · 2014–2024
9 mo on HNUsing Python to Code by Voice
Next Day Video
12 HN recommender · 2013–2025
9 mo on HNTransforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python
Next Day Video
9 HN recommender · 2014–2022
9 mo on HNAgile is Dead • Pragmatic Dave Thomas • GOTO 2015
GOTO Conferences
11 HN recommender · 2016–2026
8 mo on HNPlover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM
Next Day Video
8 HN recommender · 2014–2023
8 mo on HN"The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)
Strange Loop Conference
10 HN recommender · 2023–2026
8 mo on HN"The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong
Strange Loop Conference
10 HN recommender · 2014–2025
7 mo on HNPrinciples of Technology Leadership | Bryan Cantrill | Monktoberfest 2017
RedMonk Tech Events
9 HN recommender · 2018–2025
7 mo on HNA Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)
David Beazley
7 HN recommender · 2019–2025
4 comments from Hacker News
The good ol' Ohnosecond: > An "ohnosecond" is the second after one makes a terrible mistake, such as deleting the wrong file or sending a text message to the wrong person, where the person in question can do nothing but say "oh no". The term is believed to originate from Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel, The Electronic Traveler. Reminds me (and probably a lot of devs) of a time when I deployed something breaking to production many years ago :), of course I didn't know it would break production beforehand. Recently, I accidentally deleted my entire shell history which caused me quite a bit of slowdown for some time. I'm quite used to modifying complicated commands with Ctrl+R and fzf; the deletion of my shell was truly horrifying. Tom Scott, as usual, has a great video about the onosecond (sic): ▶ this video
Tom Scott has a great video on his "Oh Shoot" moment ( ▶ this video ). Thinking back on the times I've had code exist nowhere else but the clipboard...
Somebody just had their very own "onosecond". ▶ this video The video is one that Tom Scott published in June 2020 about the worst typo he ever made in one of his prior jobs, and while the Facebook mistake is almost certainly not going to be anything irrecoverable like this one, you can bet that Facebook pride themselves on being available all the time.
Tom Scott made a mistake with a similar outcome as this article, but with an SQL query that is much more subtle than DROP. ▶ this video By all means, find ways to fool-proof the architecture. But be prepared for scenarios where some destructive action happens to a production database.